Dream up your future

Excuse me, I’m still a bit shaky. I just encountered Michael Bruce Sterling. The Bruce Sterling. Sterling is now globally seen as one of the inventors of the concept “augmented reality”, but above all he is the author of some of the best Science Fiction Books I got in my hands. His Mirrorshades anthology placed him with William Gibson, on the upper left shelf of my bookcase, where my cyberpunk collection is standing.

I’ve always seen Sterling as a semi-god, someone who dreams up a future. Jules Verne, Frank Herbert, Ray Kurzweil… they show us a future based on technology that is just around the corner… just out of grasp, but one that they –for some obscure reason- seem to see.

Seeing Sterling interacting with youngsters on augmented reality made me smile. These kids have no idea about the writer Sterling, about the phenomenon Sterling, about the designer Sterling, nor the futurist Sterling. All they see is an old guy, talking about how he sees augmented reality taking up a glowing big part of our near future. A guy that urged them “you kids have to dream up the next decades of our future”… They thought he was amusing…. and a bit coo coo